


Compromised

by seekingferret



Series: Uncompromising [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 21:50:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3463292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/pseuds/seekingferret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma Simmons, uncompromising and compromised.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Compromised

**Author's Note:**

  * For [failsafe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/failsafe/gifts).



> Thanks to Ibble for betaing.

"Excellent work, Agent Simmons," the HYDRA agent said. The agent was always a man, and he was always wearing a suit, and if some vague part of her razor sharp memory had held any of their names, knowing it wasn't important enough for her to retrieve.

Simmons flushed. "Yes, sir," she said. "The electroscopic gel should offer a significant efficiency boost to our power supplies. The secret is nanoscale resonance tuners suspended in encapsulated particles in a conductive gel. They set up a mesh network and generate oscillations. Pseudo random at first, but when they sense a current through the conductive gel, they adjust the oscillation frequency to match the current pulses. It reduces losses to heat by forty seven percent, and we're still adjusting the matching algorithm for potentially greater improvement in efficiency."

And her handlers at HYDRA needn't know about it, but the gel nanoparticles also resonated at a secondary frequency- the kill signal frequency that she had supplied to Coulson via her dead drop. If she could get this deployed across HYDRA's weapons division, she could allow remote detonation of all of their powered devices. At the time of SHIELD's choosing. But only if she got away with it. 

The problem with mass production was that she had to transmit the full plans to others in order to see it manufactured. It was hard not trusting her entire supply chain, but then, when she had trusted her supply chain with SHIELD, she'd been wrong to do so. If nobody looked closely at the obfuscated procedure in her assembly code, she might get away with it. If not, well, she'd given an oath to SHIELD years ago. And that oath still meant something to her. 

"Very impressive, Agent Simmons. I know you're pushing this because you see its civilian applications in clean energy storage, but HYDRA nonetheless appreciates its significant military applications."

It was the game they were playing together. She pretending to be reluctantly drawn into the conspiracy of HYDRA's mania, while they were pretending not to be pressing her to create more and more deadly weapons, to compromise her sense of morality so that they could harness the full lethality that Jemma Simmons was capable of when the safety restraints she'd imposed on herself were removed. There were layers beneath Simmons's story- what she couldn't tell was whether there were also layers beneath HYDRA's story, How did you take your emotional temperature and determine when you had given up too much, when you were deep inside already? How could you tell if HYDRA was winning the game? 

"I'm a scientist. I do science, no matter where I am, because there aren't any sides to science. No matter what you use my work for, the knowledge I am discovering makes the world a better place. So I don't care if I work for HYDRA or the NIH."

"Or for SHIELD?"

"They're a terrorist organization," she said. "And they're all dead, anyway." She suppressed her tremor and stared into his eyes, like the cold-blooded killer that she was.


End file.
